Cassandra Dawes has launched a health and wellness podcast. Photo: Supplied.
Albion Park’s Cassandra Dawes is breaking the silence on midlife health and wellbeing challenges, launching a new podcast to empower women with honest conversations, expert advice, and practical tips for living well — now and into the future.
Cassandra’s podcast “Mind Your Being” focuses on physical, mental and emotional health, with practical advice from leading health and wellness experts and everyday people with lived experience with midlife challenges.
“I’ve always been passionate about health and wellbeing, and this podcast is my way of bringing that curiosity to life — a space where I get to share my love of learning and have real conversations with people who inspire me,” she said.
“I want to encourage people by sharing awareness about what we can do now to live as independently as we can in the future.”
For the 51-year-old, the podcast idea had been brewing for eight years, initially as a blog concept.
Although the idea of sharing health and wellbeing information has always been with her.
Fear, however, held her back from pursuing it.
“I just let fear stop me. I thought, ‘Who am I to speak about these things? Who’s going to want to listen to that?'” she said.
After completing introductory psychology units and a Diploma of Counselling during COVID, Cassandra finally decided to take the leap earlier this year and start “Mind Your Being” podcast.
It took 12 attempts before the first health professional agreed to be interviewed, giving her the confidence to continue.
With the first episodes released last month, guests so far have included a psychiatrist discussing women’s mental health in midlife and the impact of hormones, and a female GP discussing menopause including potential treatment options.
“Episodes four and five are conversations with Dr Justin Keogh, an academic exercise physiologist, where we discussed the importance of maintaining muscle mass as we age, how to slow age-related sarcopenia, and how resistance training can help us to prevent falls and to maintain independent lifestyles as we age,” she said.
While primarily targeting midlife women, particularly in peri, menopause or post menopause, she said the podcast wasn’t exclusively for women.
“Midlife includes people with aging parents, so we’re looking at falls prevention,” she said.
“Midlife also includes parents raising kids, so what you can instil to get them active.”
However, she said even young listeners admitted it was good for them to learn healthy habits early.
Cassandra said the podcast was about raising awareness of issues from muscle loss to bone protection, reducing stigma around mental health, and making evidence-based information and practical tools accessible and relatable.
She said it was to support those in midlife and beyond facing the ups and downs of life and looking to not just survive, but thrive as they grew older.
“I’m mindful that no-one wants to be told what to do,” she said.
“I’m sharing the awareness, and then if people can at least know about things, they might pay more attention to what they want to focus on.
“They might say, ‘OK, I understand why that’s so important’ or ‘I didn’t realise we lose so much muscle mass, and what I can do about it’.
“Or maybe they’re not thinking about the next 10, 20 or 30 years and what we can do now to try and live as independently as we can.”
Working part-time as a public servant, she hopes to one day make the podcast her full-time focus, but for now wants to continue attracting quality guests.
She said she planned to feature more Illawarra guests with lived experience discussing physical health, mental health, mindfulness and other wellbeing topics.
“Mind Your Being” podcast is available on Spotify, with more information available on her website.
